The Institutional Stance

Human success in constructing and navigating a complex social world is typically associated with the ability to interpret other people’s behavior in terms of mental states—a mentalistic stance. We argue that humans are endowed with a second equally powerful intuitive theory: an institutional stance that interprets social interactions in terms of structured institutional representations. In contrast to the mentalistic stance, which helps us predict and understand unconstrained behavior via unobserved mental states, the institutional stance shapes and regulates behavior via normative expectations embedded in roles (i.e., institutions). Precursors of the institutional stance may also help explain non-human social behavior, supporting social interaction between conspecifics that lack complex models of each others’ mental states. At the same time, the institutional stance is unique in humans in its generative capacity, supporting rapid construction, tracking, and inference of institutional structures that shape our social world and enable the possibility of large scale social coordination and new forms of institutional life. Uniquely-human social cognition is best understood as an interplay between mentalistic mechanisms for predicting others’ behavior embedded in normative institutional structures that help render behavior predictable.